S23 ultra camera over exposed

[Ash45]

Notice top three window panes on the right side. There are bricks on the wall but in the picture it's totally blown up.

Is anyone facing camera oversaturation issue with s23 ultra ? 

[userBHlE0IoHMK]

You are right. I don't think most people really look closely enough at these raw images but they simply are down sampled previews with lower resolution than the JPEG or HEIF saved at the same time. They are more pixelated if you compare the JPEG captured at the same time. If you import them into Lightroom and do some basic editing to match the brightness and color you will realize they are far more sharper in Lightroom than they appear in default Gallery app.

So it seems Samsung hasn't enabled any builtin app to support decoding the real DNG raw files. They just let you see the embedded JPEG previews. So does the expert RAW app. I am not sure if Samsung intended this or it's a bug. But this is really misleading and 99% of people wouldn't realize they need a 3rd party professional app to see the raw properly and they would simply assume they have a better quality raw copy but what they really get is a worse quality preview

[spagoot]

I mean my problem is that it still looks terrible with limited ability to zoom in even when exporting it to other apps.

I'll have to look deeper on my desktop when i have a chance, but that's a bummer that it's basically creating digital paperweights on the phone

[userBHlE0IoHMK]

It has to be some "proper" app that knows how to handle DNG files. Lightroom will do the job I am sure. After viewing and adjusting in Lightroom I can say the clarity of the raw finally matches that of the same JPEG, and of course at the same time allow you to adjust sharpening and smearing as you will

[-Spc]

I tested RAW on my new S23 Ultra and the image quality is amazing for being a phone.

Here's an example, i took a picture of my VW Turan gear shift stick.
It was taken with Expert RAW at 50mpix then downsized to 2048 resolution.

Image link:
http://www.netsky.org/S23Ultra-50Mpix-RAW.png

If you have 10bits per channel monitor (30bits) and photoshop you can see gradients are true 16bits per channel in this image, browsers will only display 8bits per channel.

More examples:
http://www.netsky.org/S23Ultra-50Mpix-RAW1.png

http://www.netsky.org/S23Ultra-50Mpix-RAW2.png
http://www.netsky.org/S23Ultra-50Mpix-RAW3.png

[ArturJarosz]

I would say they are amazing only in perfect light situations. When there is not enough light, Samsung tries to apply massive amounts of noise reduction, which makes them terrible. In the comment below, you can find my comparison with GCAM. This is JPG, but for DNG it is the same story. 
And ExpertRAW is not RAW per se. A RAW file is just readout from the sensor with demosaic. ExpertRAW DNG is a merged version of multiple frames with different exposure, to make dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio better. That would all be fine if no extensive processing is applied even in that DNG by Samsung. 

[Biggus]

Samsung AMOLEDs are 10bpc native so far works too. The raws aren't anything near actual 16bpc though. If you look at them in raw digger which provides histogram analysis of each channel on a log graph from 0 to 2^bit_depth, you'll find that the majority of the data in the shadows is quantized from what looks like stretching + NR, so you lose maybe half the info there and it's down to 11 or 12 bits already; unfortunately this is the area that usually benefits more from raw since you can pull detail out of underexposures. Similarly none that i checked had anything but statistical outliers (aka noise) above around 2^14 and more quantization artifacts indicating stretched lower bitness data were easily visible as the channels tapered off to nothing. So the two most significant bits are gone too and the "real" file range is probably 9-10 bits, maybe 11 under perfect conditions. Raws that hadn't been debayered showed the same quantization issues but looked more like 10bpc stretched to 12, so I'll be generous and say they were 10.

Preprocessed "raws" from the main camera also reported at 12 bit IIRC but the quantization was compounded by similar lack of use of the upper 2 bits and NR destruction of the lowest 3 with quantization visible through the shadow and tail regions that weren't cut entirely. I decided it was probably ~9 bit and useless vs opencamera bracketed exposure photos merged in an actual raw editor (not mobile lightroom, it lacks enough control over the merge process and how to tone map the results). If you have ~95% of 30-bit monitors on the market they're an 8 bit panel with FRC so are generally considered ~9ish bits sorta. If that's the case you won't be able to tell those from, tada! If it's not IPS that's native res at 60Hz (not a guarantee, but I don't think anyone makes a faster panel in 10bpc, there's a physical limit to how fast you can flip polarization of liquid crystal accurately to 1024 values), on OLED it's at least possible to hit 12bpc with better DACs... They all support 12bpc 4:4:4 RGB YCbCr as input over HDMI (or 4:2:2 YCbCr on old hdmi devices). I'm guessing it's easier to process as rgb since things like computing dolby vision final frames would normally need to convert go RGB first anyway.

I wouldn't trust the phone amoled to be displaying in 10bpc all the time , given that editing any video still converts it to the old PAL SDTV colorspace (or flags it that way) because somebody didn't bother setting the correct one. You also lose 10bpc in hevc if you had it from shooting hdr10+.

The windows photo viewer / explorer previews had high bit depth added a short time after HDR support was added (along with actually reading embedded ICC profile data now) and it's available through standard image rendering now so any lack of browser or specific format Windows support is bad programming. I suspect Edge probably views them correctly now. Firefox might but they're pretty bone -stupid about detecting Windows accelerated drawing support correctly and ICC is a manual enable. Photoshop has gone pure garbage over the last 4 years of updates but the open source Krita will handle 10 bit images *and* editing HDR10 images that can be displayed as such on compatible displays which is preferable to normal tonemapping after an hdr merge if you have the display for it since tonemapped versions will be limited to lower max brightness.

[ArturJarosz]

I would say that there is a problem with S23 Ultra processing, no matter if that is JPG or DNG. Switching to GCAM gives far better results, but is limited to only 12 Mpix. But still, in a worse light, no matter if that is JPG or DNG< it is just a mess from both the Camera app and ExpertRAW.
An example:

And with a closeup of details: 

No matter the resolution, it is just bad in Samsung apps. Only LMC (GCAM) retains the detail of the wood. The same story applies to DNG and JPG. 
In perfect light conditions, outside, ExpertRAW can be more detailed, but as soon as some cloud covers the sun...
And another thing is - ExpertRAW output is not RAW per se. It is a fusion of a few frames, with preprocessing applied, such as noise reduction and sharpening. Only RAWs from the main app are true raws, which can be easily seen in how noisy and natural these are. 

[spagoot]

I've been trying to get GCAM working but it crashes for me on open - what version are you using? Did you find it in xdadevelopers forum?

[ArturJarosz]

I use one from xda forum. It crashes because gcam load on first start XML that is not compatible with your device. After lunch you need to quickly swithc to video mode, and then load proper xml. On xda forum you have all links and manual how to make it work. 🙂

[spagoot]

I must've overlooked that
I'll go back in and try both out
Thank you!!